From Sunday's Daily Yomiuri: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070527TDY03003.htm The last sentence is by far the most intriguing, and I wish I knew more. E-voting system eyed for national elections

The Yomiuri Shimbun An electronic voting system using touch-screen panels likely will be phased in for national elections starting from next year, it has been learned. The ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito is eyeing the new system after New Komeito reversed its initially cautious stance and decided to support the move, according to sources. The ruling parties will submit a bill to revise the special law for the Public Offices Election Law in the current Diet session, which will stipulate Jan. 1, 2008, as the date for the law's enforcement, the sources said. However, the electronic voting system will not be introduced simultaneously in all municipalities. Among municipalities that already have ordinances allowing the use of electronic ballots for mayoral and assembly elections, the internal affairs and communications minister will choose municipalities based on applications received from election boards. Currently, eight municipalities have such an ordinance. The use of electronic polling systems for local elections became possible in February 2002, since when it has been used for 15 elections held in 10 municipalities. The result of one election that employed the system was nullified after errors were detected in the electronic voting machines. ===== Last week there was an article about quick election results here. In prefectural (state) elections, some towns returned their results in as little as 20 minutes even when using hand-counted paper ballots! (Some other municipalities ranged as high as a couple of hours.) One simple expedient is that when you go to vote, you are given separate ballots for each office you are voting for. Then returns for any given office are a simple matter of sorting the ballots into one stack per candidate, and counting the stacks. To me, this would seem to make ballot challenges more difficult. There may also be additional opportunities for various forms of fraud -- ballot box stuffing, etc. depending on the protocols used. But it does appear to have the advantage of being efficient. If paper ballot results can be returned in so little time, what is the incentive for electronic balloting? --Rod (P.S. Speaking of elections, did you know that department chairs and even the presidents of universities here are chosen by direct election among the faculty? There are campaign speeches and balloting at an all-faculty meeting.) ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE